Very good and cost-effective CS Platform
August 30, 2021
Very good and cost-effective CS Platform
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Planhat
At Pexip, we use Planhat as our Customer Success platform. All CSM's globally use Planhat as their main tool to store customer information, look at usage trends, and manage the renewals process. We have created playbooks for various stages of the customer lifecycle, such as onboarding, upsell, and churn risk management, and these playbooks are assigned to customers as required.
Heavy use is made of the reporting capabilities in Planhat, particularly around managing renewals coming up in the next 120 days. I use these reports in my weekly calls with the management team to identify risk, spot upsell opportunities and forecast churn.
Other groups in Pexip, such as our Solutions Architect team, have also been granted read-only access to Planhat so that they can quickly look up information on any customer, and have a full picture of that client before meeting with them.
We also use the portal feature of Planhat, where we can upload documents related to the onboarding process for new customers and give the customer access to those documents. The portal can be customized to suit the needs of each particular client.
- Reporting - you can set up filters with boolean criteria to give you insight into everything you need to know.
- Playbooks - these are very good for less-experienced CSM's who need a step-by-step guide on how to deal with different stages of the customer lifecycle. More experienced CSM's may not need the playbooks.
- Usage data for customers - there's a wide range of charts in Planhat that tell the story of client consumption.
- The data in Planhat can only be as clean as its original source, and we realized that there was a lot of erroneous data shown. That's not a fault with Planhat, but it took us a long time to clean that up.
- The bubble view is touted as a key differentiator in the product, but in reality, I don't find it very useful.
- Clear reporting has helped us to identify churn risks more effectively, and therefore proactively work on those accounts to mitigate risk
- Usage data coupled with license reporting has identified many upsell opportunities that are now being worked on by the sales and CS teams
- Playbooks have helped new CSM's onboard customers more effectively, thus setting that client up for success during the rest of the customer lifecycle
When evaluating Planhat, we found that it had a better UI and was a more rounded product than Churn Zero. Planhat was considerably more expensive than Churn Zero, but we felt that the extra investment was worthwhile given that the product better met our needs.
When compared to Gainsight, we found the products largely similar. Each one had features that the other didn't have, but overall we felt that both would match our needs. The cost advantage gave Planhat the nod - we couldn't justify the extra expense that Gainsight would have incurred.
Do you think Planhat delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Planhat's feature set?
Yes
Did Planhat live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Planhat go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Planhat again?
Yes